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Comment by etherael | Hacker News Reader

I can't help but think this isn't a bad argument for a heavier investment in removing the risk to allied lives element from decisions like this, it's one thing to mistake a telephoto lens on a camera for an RPG as illustrated here http://collateralmurder.com/en/resources.html.

You might be more prepared to risk being wrong if, were you not wrong, you weren't potentially betting your life on the fact. The pilot sounded genuinely scared when he misidentified that RPG, one would not expect the same if it was a UAV feed.

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I agree with you.

In the video I didn't see a medium white Canon lens as illustrated there. I'm not sure guessing at what a man in a hostile zone is brandishing from behind a corner is going to help:

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51uImrxH1yL.jpg

Whatever it is, don't duck in and out behind corners pointing your black tube at military gunships or approaching convoys. Don't bet your life on whether the guy behind the turret paid to keep the zone clear can sort that out while you pop in and out of view.

Au contraire, the fact that a soldier is far enough away to be able to murder indiscriminately when not at risk is what caused this. If he had been standing more vulnerable but right by that road side this would not have happened.

The further you take the person pulling the trigger away from the person they murder the easier it gets.

Do you really believe the guys that dropped the bomb over Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been able to do it given an infinite supply of ammo and a machine gun that never jams pointed at fields full of tens of thousands of unarmed civilians?

You make an interesting point but the alternative is to purposely hamstring your combat abilities in order to make a commitment to using them less appealing. That doesn't sound like a sound survival strategy.

I am by nature a pacifist and would prefer not to engage in war or violence at all. However, once the bonds are slipped and the blood starts flowing, I don't think there should be any punches pulled and the more options on the table the better. I still maintain that if the pilot in this particular instance had less reason to fear for his own safety he would have been more careful with his judgement call on the combatant status of the target group.

This is actually one of the common arguments for increasing the role of remote robotic agents on the battlefield, less necessary to be overly aggressive in defense in edge cases. I think the commonly cited example is not calling artillery on apartment buildings to flush out a sniper.

> That doesn't sound like a sound survival strategy.

It wasn't meant as one. There is a price to war, it should be paid by both sides for things not to go badly out of control.

The current trend is to minimize the cost to the aggressor so that 'home support' for a war is easier to come by. If there would have been one American soldier dead for every Iraqi civilian this conflict would have been over long ago.

If the perceived cost of waging war to a nation is low then the chances of war being waged go up.

If you were a world champion boxer would you get into a lot more fist fights because it's less likely that you'd be injured in them? Speaking for myself, I would not.

I'd hope that just because we can doesn't necessarily mean we should in any case.

It depends on the character of the person.

Plenty of people with martial skills are amongst the most controlled that I've known. And then there are the psychos that are fascinated by violence.

Some countries are a lot more restrained when it comes to applying violence than others. Compare Switzerland and America for instance, the gun ownership in Switzerland is one of the highest in the world, yet gun related fatalities are extremely low. In the US it's a bit different...

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